So Aristotle says early in his Politics, a phrase that is often repeated, but usually truncated to “man is a political animal.” This observation comes only at the end of a passage where Aristotle analyzes human relationships, concluding that the polis is the highest form of community. He, of course, prioritizes free citizens and regards the civilizations of Asia as inferior on the grounds that they were slaves to the Persian king. A similar sentiment emerges in other Greek sources, such as Homeric Hymn 20, to Hephaestus, which says:

“With gleaming-eyed Athena, he taught humans on the earth splendid crafts, men who formerly dwelt in caves in the mountains, like wild beasts. But now, through the famed-craftsmen Hephaestus, they have learned crafts and they live a peaceful life all year, easily and in their own homes.”

Technically, this passage could apply to any group of people who live in man-made structures, but the progression from living like (and with) animals to a civilized, urban life appears is fairly common. In Arrian’s account of Alexander’s speech to his men at Opis says that Philip found the men “impoverished wanderers” (πλανήτας καὶ ἀπόρους), “dressed in animal hide” (ἐν διφθέραις) and “feeding a few sheep on the hills” (ἀνὰ τὰ ὄρη πρόβατα ὀλίγα) and made them civilized city-dwellers (πόλεων τε οἰκήτορας). It should not be a surprise that the common thread privileges what is considered a typically Greek way of life, nor that the Greek authors looked upon their own culture as the ideal arrangement of society. The people at the top have a tendency to think that way.

It is also notable how infrequently “non-civilized” people show up in ancient sources unless they a) pose a threat to more civilized people, b) are an object of curiosity, or c) is used as a contrast to civilized cultures as either c1) to demonstrate how far civilization had come or c2) to espouse the prelapsarian virtues of people uncorrupted by luxuries of civilization. Barring that they are invisible. For instance, Livy gives the briefest accounts of tribes of people living in the Alps only because they block Hannibal’s passage into Italy.

The phenomenon of privileging civilization is old, but it is not a relic of the past. In recent history, the Worlds Fairs put “exotic” humans, including eskimos, on display. Exhibits depicting “non-civilized” peoples tend to be relegated to Natural History museums, and they are studied in the context of anthropology museums–or, at least, in specialized history classes for, for example, Native Americans. Other peripheral communities of people are simply excluded from the narrative. That is a feature of narratives–there are those within the spotlight and those on the outside. Yet, there is also a privileging of those whose societies are in some sense structured like ours and those that are declared to be the ancestors in the truest sense, namely not just those that came before, but those that established cultures and civilizations that led to ours. Those on periphery are curiosities of secondary importance.

Siam, or the Woman who Shot a Man, set in 1967 Thailand, purports to be the story of a woman in an unfamiliar land, a portrait of her crumbling marriage, and her obsession with the dissappearance of the American silk merchant Jim Thompson (and some of her possessions). All these elements feature in the story, but the only tension that really worked was the vivid, if forced, picture of her isolation, which finally explodes.

Claire is an intellectually curious daughter of a Harvard professor, but is leaving behind New England and moving to Thailand with her husband, James, who is overseeing the construction of US airbases for the war in Vietnam. She plays the dutiful wife, and spends her time learning about Thai history, learning the language, and sightseeing with the other wives. Once Jim goes missing, fishing for information is added to her routines. The move around the globe does not go well. James is frequently away from home for work, and possibly unfaithful, Claire does not make friends, the language lessons only serve to highlight the difference between her and the other army wives, and the more she learns about Thai history, the less comfortable she is there. It is hot, dirty, the food turns her stomach, and the local customs offend her American sensibilities. Others enjoy the food and simply assume themselves superior to the locals, while, ironically, Claire is one whose academic attempts to “go native” are most at odds with the customs and foods she refuses to accept. She questions this new world she is in, but from the position that western civilization is superior. Sometimes she is right, but her solipsism was irksome.

All of this is fine as the core of a story, but the presentation is anodyne and shallow. To put it bluntly, the marriage of Claire and James is defined in the story almost exlusively by fucking and fighting, with the former seemingly something that usually happens to Claire rather than with Claire. (The dynamic made me wonder how they got as far as marriage to begin with, since she says their first meeting saw them tumbling into bed.) Similarly, she has a tendency to watch in a semi-aware state the events that transpire offscreen, everything narrated in a detached third-person perspective. She is supposed to be obsessed with Jim Thompson’s disappearance, but this is more a facet of her frustration with the tendency for events to take place and people or things to appear and disappear without explanation. The most prominent feature of the writing is the bare declarative statement, lacking in either description or emotion. There is supposed to be some power in this stark style, but this novel had a really repetitive and dull cadence as it worked around the predictable ring composition.

I picked up Siam because it seemed an interesting enough story and setting and I am trying to diversify by reading more books by women. I was totally disappointed, and only continued to read on because it was a short novel that went by quickly.

My home has thirty-eight rooms on thirty-six worlds. No doors: the arched entrances are farcaster portals, a few opaqued with privacy curtains, most open to observation and entry. Each room has windows everywhere and at least two walls with portals. From the grand dining hall on Renaissance Vector, I can see the bronze skies and the verdigris towers of Keep Enable in the valley below my volcanic peak, and by turning my head I can look through the farcaster portal and across the expanse of white carpet in the formal living area to see the Edgar Allan Sea crash against the spires of Point Prospero on Nevermore. My library looks out on the glaciers and green skies of Nordholm while a walk of ten paces allows me to descend a short stairway to my tower study, a comfortable, open room encircled by polarized glass which offers a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the highest peaks of the Kushpat Karakoram, a mountain range two thousand kilometers from the nearest settlement.

Dan Simmons’ 1989 novel Hyperion won the Hugo award for best science fiction novel of that year, and with good reason. In the distant future and on the brink of the apocalypse for the human race, a misfit band of seven pilgrims (and a baby) makes its way to the planet Hyperion to visit the mysterious creature the Shrike–known as the Lord of Pain to the interstellar church dedicated to it. The trip itself is uneventful and the route largely deserted since most people on Hyperion are trying to escape the collision course between the Shrike, the Hegemony of Man, and the Ousters set for the planet. This is to be the final pilgrimage.

Without other distractions, the pilgrims choose to tell each other their stories, which are recorded by the Consul, a mysterious career diplomat who once oversaw Hyperion for the Hegemony. One by one they spin out their stories, a priest, a soldier, a poet, a scholar (and father), an investigator, and a diplomat, all revealing their connections to the Shrike, their secrets, and, ultimately, what they hope to accomplish on the trip. There is action and adventure without being an a&a story, family without being a family story, origins without being an origin story, love without being a love story, and religion without being a religious story. Of course, it is all of those. These stories-within-the-story span the planets occupied by human beings since the “hegira” away from earth and the centuries since the exodus took place. Hyperion, the planet that seems fated to be the site of the apocalypse, is an out of the way world settled by the Sad King Billy with the dream of turning it into a artistic paradise that has since become a ramshackle backwater.

Remarkably, each of the sub-stories subtly shifts the presentation toward the tenor of the new narrator’s account. Taken together, the stories form a collage of human civilization across the Worldweb, the planets linked by farcaster portals (portals that don’t require weeks of travel and years of time-debt to travel between worlds), which mimics human society on earth just with better technology.

It is often said that science fiction and fantasy are genres of ideas, and Hyperion has those to spare, but what set it apart is how visually stunning the novel is. Simmons is over the top when it comes to his descriptive prose and allusive names, but once, I settled into the style, the descriptions became increasingly affecting and, in turn, gave new vividness to the sub-stories. The quote that opened this review is one example of how this worked without giving away anything of the plot. The speaker at the time goes further to note the challenge of adjusting to such a house since each individual room had a different level –and sometimes orientation– of gravity. Hyperion is a deeply moving account of traveling companions telling each other tales as the worlds come crashing down behind them, which adds to the surreality and beauty of story. This is one I can say without reservation I highly recommend.

ΔΔΔ

I don’t know what I am going to read next in part because I am probably going to a bookstore later today and want to leave my options open. Instead of a novel, last night I started reading M.I. Rostovtzeff’s 1932 book Caravan Cities about the social and economic history of cities located along caravan routes in the Middle East during the Hellenistic Period. Thus far it is interesting, but both less well cited and less pithy than his Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World.

Following the model of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and its final segment, I am using some of these posts as a reminder to myself that there are things that bring me joy and as a means of posting recommendations of things–usually artistic or cultural, sometimes culinary–that are worth consuming.

My big failing in the trivia night I usually go to is that I have gaping blind spots when it comes to music. I’ve always said I like what I like and don’t usually go out looking for new stuff. However, I have recently started listening to Spotify’s “discover weekly” and then listening to full albums from the artists whose songs I liked. Yesterday I came across the group Cowboy Mouth, a New Orleans rock group whose driving sound and bombastic lyrics I am quite enjoying. I don’t agree with the lyrics in every song, but neither do I find them objectionable the way I do in some songs commonly on the radio.

There weren’t many high quality videos I could find, but this is one of the more popular songs, “Jenny Says”:

I am a book person, for better and worse. I even have a bad habit of dismissing things designed for visual representation because I read them rather than seeing them performed. In the case of Star Wars, I have read both a lot really good novels set in the expanded universe and read a lot of dreck. I went into the The Force Awakens hesitant, but cautiously optimistic that Abrams and co. would make a fun, watchable film. I was not wrong, but neither was I completely swept away. My verdict is that The Force Awakens was good, not great. With that in mind, what follows is a list of things I liked and didn’t like about the film (format adapted from ESPN’s Zach Lowe), and contains mild spoilers.

Struggle is ruthless, with no room for such bourgeois weaknesses as human kindness.

I don’t remember where I first picked up A Small Town Called Hibiscus, but I think it was for a college class on twentieth century China. Assuming I read it then, ten years have passed and I approached the novel without any memory of it. I both liked and am conflicted by the story, which follows several families in a rural town in southern Hunan province over the course of two decades between the 1960s and 1980.

A Small Town Called Hibiscus consists of multiple overlapping stories. First and most plainly it is a portrait of a small, out of the way town that must cope with the changes beyond its power. In this way it is analogous to Ivo Andric’s Bridge on the Drina. Modernity comes with its sterile hospitals, high walls, and polluted rivers, but the the worst suffering is at the hands of familiar faces, not this anonymous leap forward.

Second, there the story of the condemnation and eventual vindication of Hu Yunan, Sister Hibiscus, who is beloved in the town for selling beancurd at a stall at the market. Hers is a story of a happy marriage and how hard work and aroused envy and thus hatred, causing her fall. And yet, amid the pain and suffering, there is love and there is hope.

While Hu Yunan’s specific story is given the place of honor since she is shown as nearly without fault, it is also representative of most people in the town. The citizens of Hibiscus for the most part want to live as a community and love their neighbors, to eat well, laugh, and grow old. The changes in the world make this idyllic vision just a fantasy and make Hibiscus a grim and frightful place.

Third, A Small Town Called Hibiscus is a moral parable about capitalism and communism, and this is where I was conflicted. Hu Yunan is what might be termed a petty-capitalist Mary Sue—she is perfect. Beautiful and charming, she has both a husband and a small business that succeeds through her hard work. She and her husband make enough money that they can purchase a plot of land from Wang Qiushe (a lazy “activist” who makes his living by mooching off land redistribution rather than by working) and build a house. Out of jealousy and thinking he should have charged more dor the land, Wang conspires with Li Guoxiang, a petty party member who is jealous of Hu Yunan’s looks and business success (it cuts into her state-owned business’ margins), to have the couple declared “Wealthy Peasants.” The devoted “communists” are largely revealed to either be envious of the couple for the success of their hard work or too fearful to push back against the elements destroying the town. Presented with these stark alternatives, capitalism is shown favorably.

I suspect, however, that Gu Hua is primarily critical of the Chinese communist party in this time period since political repression became the weapon of the vindictive and he shows it operating with no real sense of what it stood for other than the power of the party itself. These same mechanisms are easily turned on those who once wielded them. Gu Hua honors characters who live their lives humanely and generously, whether they do so by farming, selling bean curd or looking after children in the neighborhood. They suffer, but they persevere. Hibiscus is a small town and this is above all a story of survival.

One final point: I read the Gladys Yang translation, which is perfectly adequate, but by her own admission misses some of the richness by her deficiencies. I didn’t like some of her choices, such as translating Chinese to American currency, which both felt out of place and loses something in that the translation itself is thirty-five years behind in terms of inflation. The translations also erred toward the literal and were at times choppy in ways that lost the force of a scene.

One of my persistent complaints about Columbia is that there is a lot of light and therefore a lot of light pollution. This is not necessarily noticeable when walking in the shadow of buildings downtown in the middle of the night, but my west-facing windows on the east side of town are lit up by a harsh glow as I try to sleep. During this time of year, that usually means that the unsettling glow picks up as early as five in the afternoon and there are few stars to be seen. (I sometimes wonder if I would have the same negative reaction if there was the blue glow of LEDs coming from town and suspect not because it is a softer light.) However, I do like that many of the buildings around town are outlined with lights during the winter, giving the town a sort of cubist look against the skyline. Similarly, I like that many of the trees lining the streets downtown are lit up in the evenings. Mid-December is a dark time of year and these flairs of light are nice touches. I want those lights to be there, but would like some way to contain them somehow.

Written as an “entertainment” as distinguished from serious works, Graham Greene’s 1932 novel, and arguably his first major literary success–it was made into a movie in 1934–lives up to its billing.

Stamboul Train unfolds over the course of a trip from Ostend to Istanbul, with the action worked into the train’s course between major relays where additional protagonists leap onto the train of love, lust, obligation, revolution, and theft. Unwittingly at the center of these schemes is Coral Musker, a poor chorus girl who took a job in Istanbul and could only afford a third-class ticket for the three day trip and caught cold and faints. She is helped out by Dr. Richard Czinner, a communist returning to Belgrade, and catches the eye of Carleton Myatt, a Jewish businessman who buys her a first-class sleeping cabin, in return, of course, for favors. In Cologne this troika is joined by Janet Pardoe, and almost by accident by Janet’s (jealous) partner, the lesbian journalist Mabel Warren who is sure she recognizes Czinner, who the rest of the world thinks is dead. At Vienna they are joined by Josef Grünlich, a thief seeking to escape detection.

The first part of each section is dedicated to events surrounding the station, including the individuals coming and going from the train before it picks up and heads into the ever-snowier east. This is not a mystery like the more-famous Agatha Christie novel and the actions and ambitions of each character are laid out quite plainly. Instead, there is banter as the characters try to deceive one another and the intrigues swirl as they each try to determine what their obligations to each other actually are. For instance, what does Coral owe Myatt for having paid for her to have an expensive room? What does Myatt owe Coral for effectively promising to take her on as his mistress (she isn’t Jewish, so she cannot be one he takes on as a wife)? What do Janet and Mabel owe each other and is the partnership replaceable? Does Mabel owe Czinner anything or should she angle simply for her front-page by-line? Does Grünlich have any loyalties?

Issues of class and money loom large. The the passengers on the train are divided by class, but the roots run deeper. In particular, Czinner is a communist revolutionary indulging in expensive tickets on this journey and Myatt is a wealthy businessman who can afford to throw around money in order to draw women to him and yet he is subject to insult on the grounds that he is Jewish.

Stamboul Train was a pleasant and quick read, but, beneath the snappy exterior, the novel has a grim message. The conductors are totalitarian, the world is burning while the train hurtles along, the good and innocent are utterly at the mercy of those with money and largely without morals. It is an entertainment, but Greene sells it short by distinguishing it thusly.

December is here–and already flying by. This is always a busy time of the semester and, even though I am not preparing students for exams or furiously grading papers to meet a deadline, I feel busier than I ever have been. This is because I have finally broken into a good stride in terms of writing, namely that I am spending most waking moments doing so, with a cup of coffee in front of me and surrounded by piles of library books. At the moment I am cleaning up the last few points on about eighty pages of dissertation revisions that I turn in on Monday, and have the review notes for revisions on an accepted article (plus one more job application) to tackle immediately after that. Then more dissertation revisions (I would like to get another 40 pages done in two weeks), work on two conference papers, a conference abstract, and edit another article for submission. I guess what I am saying is that I am staying busy but that progress is taking place. I also very much enjoy what I do. However, this also means that I have not had much time to focus on reading for fun, much less on writing here, though I did finish two books in November.

I may get around to writing longer thoughts about this behemoth, but haven’t yet both because of the aforementioned writing tasks and because I am still trying to wrap my head around what happened in the story. I have mentioned before that I sometimes struggle keeping tabs on whoiswho and whatiswhat in reading Russian novels, and that was particularly the case in Demons, which careens between a large number of characters, sometimes being a close character study of individuals such as the intellectual Stepan Trofimovich, his patron Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin, and her son Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, other times commentary on the Russian Marxist vanguard committees, and still other times giving a sweeping impression of the interplay between the aristocracy and the common folks in the town. It is a dark, funny, examination of a political assassination (or set of assassinations, really) in an isolated Russian town where the people who look the best are often the most twisted, things that look too good to be true certainly are, and where there is a pervasive, exhausting tension at every level of society that is liable to break open. Things could be worse (as several characters note, they were once workers in America), and while the leading aristocrats play deadly idle games to maintain their position, the disaffected aspire to bring about a revolutionary future without having any idea what to do should they succeed. Perhaps most damningly of all, Dostoevsky sets this revolutionary committee squabbling amongst themselves in this provincial town where the threat to their lives from the state is still real, but where they seem to have no chance of affecting change.

Another Russian novel, set in 1920s Moscow. The Letter Killers are a collection of writers who now aspire to set free their conceptions by expounding in narrative form upon a theme every Saturday night. Letters and books, they say, inhibit the individual from having his own conceptions and thus the pure form is direct communication from conceiver to audience. The Letter Killers Club consists of a frame story told by the interloper (i.e. non-professional conceiver), and then five of the conceptions, one for each week of the story. Thus, when reading the book, one is reading the writings of a non-writer who both has his own narrative and transcribes five conceptions that were not meant to be written down. It is a dense little book that builds layer upon layer. I cannot claim to understand all of the themes so well as the narrator, but enjoyed it nonetheless. I also must applaud the New York Review of Books series for the attractive format of their books and for helpful introductory material.

I am now reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a book that I once picked up but am not sure I ever finished.

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Welcome to my blog. Although the host is new, the blog is not--the first post went up in January 2008.
I write about a variety of topics here including, but hardly limited to, baking, books, movies, historical topics, and politics. This is a catchall for a range of topics, particularly those that are not part of my research portfolio.